After many attempts at writing stories, I have found that I am not capable of writing as a pantser. Though the words flow through me once I get started, I need a solid plot to get me through to the end; otherwise I'll write and rewrite and never finish anything. But how do you discover the plot? With my stories, I discover it through writing, I have a vague idea (or a solid one) and then I put characters in that world. Everything is very hazy at first, I cannot picture the scenery or much of anything, only character action which I suppose is the definition of plot? As I write, things become clearer and I can start from the beginning and try again, the story builds upon itself after every attempt. But as I do this, the amount I write becomes longer and longer the closer I get to a finished story while not seeing the end of it because you cannot be sure it won't take a sudden turn along the way. Because of this, I have become fearful of even starting because I know that most will not end up in the final product. I was hoping plot would fix this, that I didn't have to make so many changes if the plot was solid from the beginning, but even the plot changes as I discover things along the way. Perhaps I just choose stories with too vague of an idea or maybe I jump into the story too early, hoping it will make sense in the end... I'm just very confused and can't seem to learn what I need to do to finish something. Perhaps I just need to stop trying to write novels on vague ideas...
Novels, yes, those are going to require plotting. But short stories or flash, you can certainly get away with nonlinear plots,or no plots at all. Takes Luis Borges for example. Often his stories are abstract snippets of very cerebral images, or themes. I often try to write a short story based on a single element of writing, such as a perspective, or a single theme, and use the bulk of the story to engage that theme or element. David Foster Wallace does it his short works, such as in his short "Good People," where the entire story is internalized by the main character as he sits on a bench with the girl he got pregnant and debates with himself whether he loves her and if she should get an abortion. Even Hemingway does it with "Hills Like White Elephants," where the story is an obscure argument between an American man and woman in Spain, likely again about him wanting her to get an abortion. The strength of the story-telling comes through in the natural feeling speech, as they are both lying to each other in a hidden power struggle that we see neither the beginning nor end result. The point is, plot is an element of writing, and like the others, it can be purposefully circumvented if other channels are used accordingly. What kind of stories are you trying to tell? If you're having so much trouble in plotting, why don't you attempt a few short works on particular themes and try to make that come through in your own way. Try perspective shifts, ones you're not used to. Experiment. You don't always need to follow the linear, tried and true, methods. Obscurities can go a long ways.
You described following your characters, so you've a scene in your head hopefully involving conflict. What I do/did then is to build on this conflict, to imagine forward and backward how a character got into this scene and what could happen after—before I write. This step involves slipping into the head of this character and making him my own. As I get a sense of who he is and how he got to where he is, I learn more about the world he lives in, which tells me about the stakes. From your description of your problem, I think it's not so much a question about plot as of character. Because as soon as you know who he is and where he goes to, you know the beginning, the middle, and the end which gives you the plot. And then you can write Good luck!
I've mentioned this on a couple threads but after having a WIP die an ugly death due to a badly designed plot with too many holes and a lack of interest in resolving it, I gave up and started two separate story settings: 1) I designed the world and the basic details. 2). I went to the short story and flash fiction prompts and stared writing stories based in those worlds around those prompts. This allowed me to develop the world in a more detailed manner, and if any issues come to light, it is much easier to fix in a short story or two vs a 90K rough draft. 3). I tried to make the stories either sequential or completely stand alone. The stand alone's serve to flush out the world, the sequential ones follow what is becoming the main story. 4). As a result, I have a short story that is around 10K words, with the other stories, that combined, is close to 40K words. Once I have all the short stories, I may either a). work to combine it into one cohesive story or b). look to publish it as a collection of short stories(The space between the stories is anywhere from a few months to two decades, with one of the flash fiction more like five decades out). I know many writers have detailed outlines for their stories, but with this I started with no plan and just let the stories take on a life of their own and see how it progresses. Planning is fine if you have a clear, concrete idea of your end goal, but I didn't, so it became a choice of either 1). Write and see what happens, worst case is a group of semi related short and flash stories. or 2). Don't write well trying to plot out a story from start to finish.
You're going to get a lot of advice, probably great advice, about how to develop these things along the way, but I have an idea you might try. I have different issues, but they're similar enough in their results that this might help. Who knows? My outline process has become almost more like writing a super skimpy rough draft. I discover things along the way, rewrite and hone the story the way I would discovery writing, but what I end up with is two or five or ten thousand words of all tell and no show. I find it very helpful. There's still room for going completely off book in the writing of the real first draft, but I have the characters more or less developed and the story thought out through to the end.
I think it's this. Sometimes when I get an idea for a scene, I start writing it too soon, and actually putting it into words is difficult at best. If I give it a few days, run things over in my mind and work out the kinks a little, it comes out a lot more smoothly. I do my best thinking when I'm active - mindless labor, going for a walk, whatever - or in the quiet time between when I go to bed and when I fall asleep: my body's relaxed, my mind is wandering, and it's easier to plan things out. Plus, you know, my subconscious can chew on it when I'm asleep, and I sometimes I get the answer I seek when I wake up.
Totally agree with all of this. Reflection time is just as important to a writer as actual writing time, I reckon. I, too, find walking an extremely amazingly effective way to get the imagination running. (Make sure you ALWAYS carry a notebook and pen!) Most of my stories originally took shape in the time before I fell asleep or, more commonly, during the time after I woke up but stayed in bed to think. (Could be middle of the night, OR morning.) Mornings are really productive for me ...mainly because the day's events haven't usurped my daydreaming yet. A morning walk nearly always produces fruit ...not only envisioning scenes and dialogue, but also overcoming plot holes and other construction issues. Don't know why, but walking unblocks a lot for me.
Ha, I could talk for hours about this stuff. I've been studying how the creative mind works for a few years, and you're on the money. The practicalities of a story (or anything creative end you're trying to achieve) is is constructed with forebrain thought - so the "hard nosed" part of your brain that you use for reasoning and rational thought. So I find that if I'm ironing out problems with the plot, planning my chapters, building in the structure or trying to think of how and when to bring to a cohesive end to a work, I produce to most fruit sitting at my desk (or at least a table in a cafe or whatever) with a pen, paper and coffee and thinking, brainstorming and making notes. But the creative side of your work (actually writing the prose and coming up with ideas) is best done using the fruits of your subconscious mind. You'll be getting ideas when you're going for a walk because you're allowing your subconscious to be unclamped and to freewheel behind the scenes. It can't be forced to give you ideas - one thing I've learned is to let go and trust that my brain will give me the answers I need, if I pose problems to myself and let them percolate in my mind for 24 hours or so. Since figuring this out, I don't get writer's block.
Yeah. I always worry about people who have been given the notion that if they're not actually sitting and writing that they're not really 'writing.' So that means folk sit with heads empty of ideas and hearts empty of enthusiasm, tapping out words just to tell themselves they're writing, and then wonder why the end result is so unsatisfying. I know lots of people (me included) don't particularly rate Anne Rice as a writer, but I did read an interview with her once that made perfect sense. No one can argue with the volume of her output. She's a very prolific (and successful) writer. She says she often takes breaks of three or more months, where she doesn't write a single word. When she's ready to go again, she goes. But she also cautioned against the notion that you must chain yourself to your writing machine every day in order to produce work. Some people are wired that way. Others are not. It's up to each writer to discover what works for them. If all they ever do is think about writing and plan what they're going to write, but never actually get it written ...that's obviously a problem. But if they stop writing for a while to recharge the creative batteries, or to work out of a story problem, that's another thing. As long as they do eventually produce the story they wanted to write, any method is fine.
The notion that you are only working on a creative project if you are chained to a desk is probably why so many never finish their project. My walks alone and my music I zone out to are just as important to writing as having a keyboard is.
Yeah, just go to the damn park and take a notebook. Listen to music. Chill out and just let the ideas f l o w. And then stop when you're getting tired. Don't lose the enthusiasm for your story, because then you won't finish it. Burnout is bad.
It strikes me that this might boil down to an introvert/extrovert difference, though I think a person can learn to work in a different way from their natural tendency if they see the importance of it.
Adapt or die comes to mind. I write best between 10am-12pm, a pretty narrow window, but I'm able to smash out 2k words fairly consistently. When I used to work 15 hour shifts for a travel company, at odd hours, I'd bring a briefcase with my laptop in and get it out whenever I got the chance - sometimes in the small hours of the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes during my preferred window. I didn't always hit my targets, but at least I found a way to keep writing.
Thank you all for all the responses, but remind me: a plotter is one that design the story and have complete control what happens while a pantser lets the story reveal itself? A panster can still work on the plot, it's just that he doesn't have control over it? Because that's what I feel happens, and as IHaveNoName said, I may just jump into writing before enough of the plot has materialised for me. The narrative, as Steven King would call it, everything else is description and dialogue. Some stories are easier than others because sometimes plot is driven by one character, but sometimes there are several. I think I'm also struggling because there might be several main characters in my current story... See! I don't even know... The story as a life of its own, or perhaps I'm just too incompetent to put a leash on it.
If we're talking about a novel, everyone works on the plotting at some point or ends up with pointless garbage (unless they're incredibly lucky or insanely intuitive). It's just that the pantsers do it in revision, by taking what they've already written and hammering it into some form that makes sense. Many people just find that they can only come up with good material while pantsing, not while trying to start by creating the framework. Each process puts you in a different mode—pantsing is far more creative, and plotting is all logic and form, and if taken to an extreme, form can easily shade over into formula. There are 2 modes of thought we use—creation and censorship. They're the Scylla and Charybdis we must learn to navigate between effectively. One is positive, allows the imagination to flow unimpeded, and the other is negative and destructive. You build up and then you carve off the parts you don't need and put things into better order. By nature I'm definitely a pantser, but I decided I want to learn plotting just to expand my horizons, more tools to work with. And I find what I come up with while plotting seems prosaic (well, it IS prose after all, but you know what I mean) or generic and uninspired. Now that I've done it for a while I'm ready to go back into pantsing mode. I may jump back and forth a few times, see if my plotting improves in creativity with some familiarity with the process.
You seem to be trapped in that limbo between plotting and free form. If you create an outline, it's not creative enough, but if you jump right in, you have no control and you can't shape any meaningful interactions. What you need to do is completely change how you're thinking of that first draft. It's not a draft and it's not an outline. Let it live somewhere between the two, because that's how you naturally approach writing. Basically, start however and wherever you want (beginning, middle, end), and explore a scene there. Don't waste time with filler. You might just write a paragraph or two and then skip ahead to the next important part, maybe filling in some notes about how the two connect. You're basically pantsing. (I don't like that word . . .) You want to hit crises and turning points and defining dialog and character defining moments. Just let those come from the details, keeping in mind Sensei Gaiman's most important advice: "And THEN what happens?" As you add details to those instances, they'll shape what's before and after them. Since you wasted very little time on any one section, it is very easy to adjust those other moments for maximum impact. (Whatever that means . . . emotion, action, the genre payoff.) Always think in terms of arc. Be willing to delete. Every character and paragraph blurb has to earn its right to exist. You're building a hybrid of an outline and a draft. It might take a week or so. When you're done, start at the beginning and write it out fully. That will take months. You'll have an excellent idea of what the direction is (literally, the plot). What you don't want to do is start at the beginning and write a 1000 words a day until you burn out in the middle of nowhere. You've already learned that this doesn't work for you. But that wasn't wasted time. You've discovered the negative of what you want. Kind of an Edison approach . . . The downside is that when you finish that outline/draft hybrid, it's not really a 1st draft at all. It's more of a skeletal structure with certain features fleshed out (scenes and fragments of scenes). But at least it has a purpose and a logical direction. When all the pieces are connected, you have a sort of creative taxidermy that has focus, but whose parts are surprising. I think that spear is a porcupine quill.
Pardon me for being blunt, but this is complete bullshit. Let me explain. First of all, I was like you once. I got an idea, usually for a setting, and sat down to write about it, hoping a story would come out of it. I would write and write, and never get to the end. I needed a different way. I looked at how other authors did things, and couldn't find much consistency. I think many writers have this internal gift of just understanding plotting; it comes so naturally to them that they don't even realize they're doing it. Professionally I'm a business analyst. On a project, part of my job is to figure out how things are done in a process and map it out. Ha! Surgeon, heal thyself. When I interview people, I ask them what their job is. They always start in the middle with what they think is the most important aspect of their work, or the most tedious. I always ask, "Why do you do that?" Insightful people will tell me, and then it's an iterative process to work out the entirety of their job, stem to stern. This applies to writing stories this way: when you want to write a story, ask yourself "what happens"? It doesn't have to be much. "Man sits on park bench and feeds pigeons; one bites his hand." Why did this happen? Two vectors have met to create this point in time: one is the man sitting on the park bench, the other is the pigeon eating from his hand. It's probably not very interesting to figure out why the pigeon is there and biting the guy, but maybe. But why is the guy there? What brought him to this park bench? Start to answer that question, and you'll start to outline your story. Is he lonely because he lost his wife? Does he just love pigeons? If so, why? What experiences as a child brought him to love pigeons? Did his father raise them? Why was that? Imagine a conversation between boy and father, with father explaining that his father kept pigeons to eat during the depression when food was scarce, and he took over the practice, but couldn't bring himself to eat them... Then on to the man on the bench, who lost his father, but likes to sit there and think about him by feeding the pigeons... This story is boring, but you get the idea. I also recommend using a good writing tool. I use Scrivener, and it sort of pushes me into writing in a structured manner because it holds the structure in your face. Timelines are important. My favorite sci-fi author, Daniel Keys Moran, has a timeline for his main set of novels that starts before the big bang and goes somewhere past the year 3000. All of the stories he has told fit between 2048 and about 3100, with the exception of the third novel in the series (The Continuing Time), which starts 62,000 B.C. with some events (about a third of the book) before it fast-forwards to the late 21st century. Throughout the novels, he peppers in bits of history, making the novels VERY robust to read. Tolkien did the same sort of thing. So I made a timeline for my novel, and it's been very helpful in keeping me on track. The great part is that I can adjust it as I write things out (because I'm a seat-of-the-pants writer at heart), but the timeline gives me a framework to operate in. You are not incapable of writing, you just haven't engaged the proper practices and tools to write well given your preferred method of doing it. Try my recommendations, see what you come up with. Also, the other people here have good advice. I've learned so much from them over the last eighteen months, I can't begin to tell you how much my writing has improved. Cheers, and good luck. JD
Do you have fun writing? If so, then keep rewriting. I'm several rewrites in and for this one I'm teetering dangerously close to needing to scrap a favourite character. I don't want to do that. I feel bad about letting her go. But her arc doesn't seem to be going anywhere and I already know that the storyline I'm filling the hole up with has al lot of potential for fun writing, so I'm working towards that. But the best advice has already been given: find time to do nothing. I used to be just punching the screen of my phone all the way through my smokebreaks until a guest in a show I was working at (who I was really not liking up to that point) lamented that there was no room for emptiness anymore. Nowadays I just stand and stare for ten minutes and my mind starts to occupy itself. Whatever you do to make time for emptiness, make sure you don't spend that time trying to force yourself to think about your writing. Do menial crap.
I'd not be too worried about changing the plot as you go, or letting it evolve. I stick pretty rigidly to my plots - until I have a better, or more compelling idea, and everything changes. Plots work best as servants rather than masters, I've found.
Fellow pantser, you get me ^^ The hardest part isn't writing, it is making sense of things and I'll continue to search for the gold encrusted formula that will make all insecurities go away! First comes the idea, then you write out what you can about that idea. Hopefully some characters has been reveal by then, you explore their past and then you write down the plot. You go over the plot so many times until there are no loose ends, no why questions that hasn't been answered, then you start writing the draft again. Inevitably, I'll have to go back and forth with this as new characters arrive and new ideas emerge, I'll just have to accept that's how things are.
How I usually write a story is I first come up with a very basic premise. Then I start to figure out what characters I want to have. Then I start to write scenes that could be in the story. Do they always make in there? No. Less than 20% of the scenes I write end up in the rough draft. But by writing them I start to get to form the personality of all my characters and get an idea of what kind of society and life events would have shaped the way they view the world. It's only after I've written a boatload of scenes and gotten some ideas of all the characters, do I actually start to write out the novel.
I don't seem to be able to write scenes out of order, but I've begun framing things out so I know what's going to happen and work to tunnel in the right directions.
I think outlining a decent plot, for a novel, requires days. It's alright to write short stories instead of novels. I'm writing a novel because I would admire stories in video games which usually weren't short stories. But I'm honestly thinking of maybe writing short stories instead because I've been reading shorter forms of literature, or poems, for many years. I also feel that going from poems to novels is a huge leap, and that maybe short stories can be a good way for me to naturally transition into novels. Short stories have great value in a sense that the author can focus more on poetic and nonstory literary techniques. I like to think of short stories as the midpoint between a poem and a novel: they are short enough to be quite memorable and long enough to send a solid message. Or some readers might see short stories and novels as a difference between quality and quantity.
Plotting novels is not a short process. I budget two weeks for the outline, but that's only because I have spent countless hours over the course of months or even years running the plot through my head and coming up with what I want to do. The outlining is just the final step before writing. You really can't go from no idea to a fully realized plot with fleshed out characters in a couple of days.
